The San Diego County Regional Task Force on the Homeless has picked Gordon Walker as its new CEO, bringing in a leader from Utah who used a strategy there that people are trying to adopt in San Diego.

This area is well-poised to address homelessness, Walker said.

“There’s a political will, there’s an opportunity,” he said. “One of the big things in this community is the actual recognition of the problem. Once that’s done, we basically need to work together and be united with the service providers and all the stakeholders.”

Walker left retirement in order to move to San Diego from Germany for the position. He started on Wednesday.

San Diego County has seen a significant increase in the number of homeless people, with the last annual tally showing that 9,116 people are living on the streets or in shelters, a 5 percent increase over the last year. Of those, approximately 24 percent of homeless people are chronically homeless, a figure that rose from 1,435 in 2016 to 2,176 this year.

The problem is expected to only grow as housing costs increase and the population ages and increasingly begins to subsist on a fixed income.

While Walker was in Utah as the director of the Division of Housing and Community Development the chronic homeless population decreased by 91 percent between 2005 and 2015, according to a state study. The chronic homeless are people who have spent at least a full year living full-time on the streets and are often the most challenging to help.

Under Walker’s lead, Utah used a “housing first” strategy, a plan that is slowly being implemented in the San Diego region.

“Housing First reduces thresholds for entry to housing” because sobriety and mandatory treatment are not required, the Utah report said. “National studies indicate that this approach produces higher housing stability rates, lower rates of return to homelessness, and reductions in public costs stemming from crisis services and institutions.”

With this model organizations try and provide homeless people with shelter before they give them the option of social services like drug and alcohol treatment, mental health care, medical assistance and job training.

The report said that the chronic homeless population in Utah dropped from 1,932 people in 2005 to 178 a decade later.

“All 178 chronically homeless individuals are known by name,” the report said.

Walker said he plans to take the same approach in San Diego.

“I think it does work. Basically, the housing-first model works, not everybody is a fan of it. But what we’re really after, what we have to get, is that we’re after helping individuals,” he said.

Some members of Congress, including Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Vista, want to change some aspects of the housing-first strategy, particularly where nonprofits lose federal funding because they require drug testing and other conditions before housing people.

But the strategy proved to be less expensive than leaving people in Utah on the street, and it can be a cost-effective solution here, Walker said.

The number of non-chronic homeless people in Utah has varied. In 2005 it was just under 14,000 and later climbed to a high of about 16,000 in 2012,before dropping to about 14,500 in 2015.

San Diego County Supervisor Ron Roberts, the chair of the homelessness task force, said that Walker’s resume makes him a good fit for addressing needs in San Diego.

“It is clear from Mr. Walkers’ track record that he is the effective leader we need to build this organization,” Roberts said. “He has the skills to steer us on a path that delivers both short-term and long-term progress that will be visible to the public and change lives for the better.”

“With Gordon Walker taking the helm of the Regional Task Force on the Homeless, we appear to be heading in the right direction,” she said. “It will require system-wide cooperation and hard work, but I am hopeful that San Diego will soon see results similar to what Mr. Walker achieved in Utah.”

One researcher said that Utah’s support for the housing-first model looks so successful because of flawed methodologies and changing definitions that oversell the strategy’s effectiveness.

“I love Utah, nothing against the state of Utah, it’s a really phenomenal state, and they have done some great things on homelessness,” said Kevin Corinth, a researcher with the American Enterprise Institute. “But the 91 percent figure is not correct.”

During one of its point-in-time tallies of homeless people (an annual event that San Diego County also does) Utah inconsistently used a multiplier to estimate the number of homeless people who weren’t spotted during the tally, creating inconsistent outcomes, he said.

Additionally, the state also initially incorrectly counted people who lived in transitional housing as chronically homeless rather than as merely homeless, but later corrected its error, resulting in a decrease in reported numbers, Corinth said.

“After all these things have changed, it was hard to say if homeless had gone up or gone down over the decade” he said. “It very may well have gone down, perhaps significantly, but based on the data, that’s not necessarily the case.”

Corinth said housing-first model is certainly successful for some homeless people, but not for everyone. He said it’s probably a more prudent to measure progress by how well homeless people are served.

Walker said he has heard about the study and some of its points, but hasn’t read it himself. He said their outcomes in Utah were real, and the technical differences between the types of homes aren’t as significant as providing homes.

“We were not interested in the color of the doors, we were interested in the doors,” he said.

And while he intends to stick with the housing-first model, it’s also important to look at an individual’s needs and provide them the types of services that will assist them best, he said.

Walker was appointed to his position in Utah in 2003 after serving as the deputy undersecretary for the Department of Housing and Urban Development under President Ronald Reagan, and the executive director of the Alzheimer's Association of Utah.

He started in San Diego on Wednesday, and will be paid a $160,000 annual salary.

In March, the Regional Continuum of Care Council merged with the San Diego Regional Task Force on the Homeless. The council formed in 1998, and the task force was created in 1984 under the name the San Diego Mayor’s Task Force on the Homeless. It became an independent nonprofit organization in 2004. The task force is charged with using data to create a plan that coordinates services for the homeless throughout the county.

Walker said he thinks he can get the different interests moving in sync.

“I’m an optimist. I think that people want to help other people, and we will work very hard to make sure we’ve got good data, and make sure we have good processes to make sure the data we have is reliable,” he said..

Walker’s hiring is the second big announcement in new leadership for services for the homeless. On Tuesday, the San Diego Rescue Mission said it had hired Donnie Dee as its new president and CEO.